Forever marred by 45

How do I want to be remembered?

That’s what members of Congress should have been asking themselves for years. But the timing is especially critical for national GOP leaders, as they watch the president of the United States lose his cool over and over under the pressure of mounting evidence—including Trump’s own admissions—that he sought to have the leader of a foreign nation investigate his chief political rival.

Appealing to Republicans’ vanity may be the only way to get them to face reality when it comes to the man who will go down as the most corrupt, compromised president in U.S. history. But the fact is that much more is at stake with a leader who ignores the pleas of his own cabinet’s foreign-policy experts and is enamored with ruthless dictators the world over.

That’s a bad combination. Given Trump’s mercurial ways, it’s also deadly.

Though the deaths of many people can be indirectly traced to the president’s policy over the past nearly three years in office—think of his lackluster response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the immigrant children who’ve died in U.S. detention centers—overt evidence of the lives hanging in the balance is playing out in real time this week.

On Sunday (Oct. 6), Trump spoke with the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and shortly thereafter the White House announced the president’s abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces out of a portion of Syria near the Turkish border. That is, Trump made the unilateral call—without consulting key figures in his administration—to abandon our U.S. allies, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, key players in the effort to tamp down ISIS.

High-ranking Republicans, including senior Sen. Lindsey Graham, called it a “shortsighted and irresponsible decision.” He also pledged economic sanctions. Meanwhile, in a now-infamous tweet, POTUS said that “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”

But Trump had already given Erdogan the green light. On Wednesday, on this newspaper’s deadline, Turkey began bombing civilian areas of Syria. The toll in the region remains unknown. But the price to America’s reputation is patently clear: The U.S. can’t be trusted as an ally. Graham and his cohorts’ bluster at this time does not absolve them of responsibility here. They’ve long known who Trump is and yet they’ve stood by him. And for that, their reputations are forever marred.